Sometimes, when people hear my proposal that the "comics medium" is literally a visual language (VL), I receive a response of disbelief stating something like, "What, do you expect people to carry around little pads of paper so they can 'talk' in comic form?" Statements like this bring up an important aspect of language that is essential to address in visual language studies: the social and interactive role of language. Throughout this article, I will address how the role of social interactivity with regard to comics contributes to a further understanding of visual language.

Tom Stackpole does the experimental and innovative Invisible Forces for PV Comics and at his own site, bonedancer.com has published such innovative works as Talking Drunk Driver Blues, and the The Diptheria Plague. His newest work at his own site is Jake Dyson's Big Move.

Stackpole took a few minutes out a hectic schedule for an interview with Comixpedia's Al Schroeder.

As with everyone else in the webcomics 'scene,' I've been following the progress of webcomics experimentation with tremendous interest. I track experimental events over on Websnark. I make note of the many and sundry things that webcartoonists do that they simply couldn't do (or at least not do effectively) on paper. And, with time and energy, I've come to develop an opinion about experimentation in webcomics.

Namely, I'm against it.

Money Matters and the Modern Webcomic

Much as some webcartoonists would like to pretend otherwise, webcomics are not really an industry apart. They are part of the larger online content industry, and any analysis of their business has to take the business of all online content into account.

The infinite canvas is one of the more obvious and interesting innovations that the web brings to comics. Since Scott McCloud coined the term in his 2000 book Reinventing Comics and raised the idea in cartoonist's consciousness, there has been much debate over the validity of the infinite canvas as a storytelling device and the difficulty the average webcomics reader has in following an infinite canvas work. The Infinite Canvas application (henceforth referred to as IC) is a webcomics program designed first and foremost to address the latter issue, presenting an infinite canvas comic in a format both easily followed for the reader and offering many resourceful options for the creator.

Looking back on 2004, it's worth noting the changes, or lack thereof, that the year brought to the ever-fluctuating world of webcomics. Keenspot and ModernTales continued to expand and branch into other areas. The fully independent webcomic remains with us. New webcomics appeared, and many of the same have already vanished. A few of the old standbys have come close to retirement, as some cartoonists have had to rely increasingly on reader support to keep their strips alive.